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"Real science opens windows for us to look through. We're right at the footsteps of the most interesting scientists around."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Semi-Conducting Graphite-Gel | ||
| Computer brain structured like animal brain. |
In the story, the wheelies are learning robots.
| ...in the actual living animal brain, the whole system of synapses, neurons and connecting fibers was there to start with, and repeated activity would produce useful patterns, but with the wheelies' undifferentiated mass of semi-conducting graphite-gel it was more like the lining up of polarized particles in a magnetic field. |
| Technovelgy from Callahan and the Wheelies,
by Stephen Barr. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1960 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the positronic brain from Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story Reason and the Artificial Brain from Edmond Hamilton's 1926 story The Metal Giants.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Callahan and the Wheelies
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Tech news articles related to Callahan and the Wheelies
Tech news articles related to works by Stephen Barr
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| Collective Superintelligence Is At Hand! |
| AI Operates An Excavator |
| Grok And The City Fathers From 'Cities In Flight' By James Blish |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
